Garden 'siteseeing' - return visits
Visits to garden blogs
Every Thursday or Friday, we leave our own聽yard chores behind and聽pay Web visits to gardeners聽in every corner of the world. Today we're going to drop in on a few of the people who have visited Diggin' It at various times.
Cameron at 聽lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., a beautiful and garden-friendly area. This week she shows how to get home gardening information organized with a spreadsheet. Something I sorely need! I've tried it before, but never kept it up. (I can take a notebook into the garden, but don't usually tote my laptop outside.)
On trick that I hadn't thought of was embedding a link to the catalog the plant was ordered from. That would be especially handy in winter, when you're dreaming of the next year's garden.
There's also a nice discussion of deer-resistance, which varies from place to place, and the effects that the vagaries of the weather have on growing lavender. Although she says she's lost some lavender plants, you'd never know it from the photo of her garden. Beautiful!
Heading north, JimCharlier practices the in聽Buffalo. I'm going to filch from his profile because it describes what you experience better than I can: "I鈥檓 no great gardener. I鈥檓 no great writer either. I鈥檓 not even a good photographer. But I like gardens, I like design, I like to travel and like to share. So here鈥檚 some gardens I鈥檝e visited, and when I can, I鈥檒l show how I鈥檝e incorporate what I鈥檝e seen in my garden. A picture is worth a thousand words, so, if you don鈥檛 mind, I鈥檒l have more photos and fewer words. If you鈥檙e looking for Latin names, plant lists and hardiness zones, this is not the site for you. If you鈥檙e looking for inspiration, ideas, and to see gardens you may never have seen, or would like to visit, this site is for you."
Tag along as聽Jim, an art director,聽rambles around his neighborhood -- love those old houses -- goes on Buffalo's Garden Walk, visits the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Garden and Amboise, France (where Leonardo da Vinci spent his last three years), and rants about the tomato-eating squirrels in his backyard.
I enjoy dropping by the gardening blogs in Nebraska because I always learn something: which spring-flowering bulbs (besides hyacinths) are fragrant, growing currants, black (purple)-leaved sedums (so great for this time of year), and ninebark, a shrub I've never grown.
I especially enjoyed Elisabeth's post about planning a garden that fits your lifestyle. "Think about those lawn and garden tasks that never get done," she advises.聽"Chances are, they never get done because you hate them. Consider ways of making those tasks easier or making them go away all together."
The Happy Gardener at in Britain doesn't write about her garden as much as offer practical and detailed advice on everything from harvesting leeks聽and what to do about parsnip problems to where to plant hardy cyclamen.
Although it's a British site, Americans will be comfortable with the recommendations. For instance, the pages on clematis link to both聽the British Clematis Society聽and the American Clematis Society.
Be sure to click on cyclamen-flowered daffodil (on the left). What a delightful plant!
And we invite you to return to see what the Monitor's gardening site is up to. In the coming week, you can read about mushroom festivals around the US,聽 fall's first frost, and introducing kids to gardening as well as the latest news in growing.